The making of American foreign policy 269for the United States engaging in the war, the legality of the action and the
openness of the process were not in doubt. The military superiority of the
American-led forces over those of Iraq was overwhelming; the Iraqi army was
quickly defeated in Kuwait and in the neighbouring border regions of Iraq
itself. It would have been easy for President Bush to order the US forces to
continue their drive to Baghdad to depose Saddam Hussein, as a number of
his advisers wished. However, Bush decided to adhere to what he considered
to be the intention of the United Nations, to free Kuwait, and the troops were
halted and withdrawn from the territory of Iraq.
Although the legality of the Gulf War, as it was called, was not in doubt,
the political background to the conflict was complex. The politics of oil, the
human rights record of Saddam Hussein’s regime, a possible challenge to the
role of America’s ally, Saudi Arabia, and not least Saddam Hussein’s hostil-
ity to Israel all played a part in the reaction of the Bush administration to
the attack on Kuwait. The Gulf War eliminated none of these factors and
indeed heightened some of them in the eyes of many interested groups in
the United States. The accession of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1993
masked somewhat the importance of these groups on the American political
scene, but they remained very focused in their attitudes towards Iraq and the
regime of Saddam Hussein.
An interesting example of the activities of a pressure group on this is-
sue is the behaviour of a neoconservative group called ‘The Project for the
New American Century’. This group concerned itself with the assertion that
Saddam Hussein was developing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and if allowed
to continue to do so would threaten the stability of the whole of the Mid-
dle East. In a letter to President Clinton in January 1998 the group called
for a new strategy, arguing that ‘That strategy should aim, above all, at the
removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.’ The authors of the let-
ter argued that the process of using United Nations inspectors to determine
whether Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction was ineffective
and causing great uncertainty. The letter continued:
Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on
the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does
acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is
almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety
of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel
and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s
supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr.
President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century
will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.‘Regime change’ in Iraq was, therefore, the aim of this group, long before the
decision was taken to invade Iraq in 2002, but this was no ordinary pressure
group. The letter was signed by Donald Rumsfeld, later to become Secretary